So many books, so little time

The human race can be divided in various ways. There are people who love baseball and those who don’t; people who love the beach and those who are bored by it; and people who read and those who don’t. Not that the nonreaders never read anything. It’s just that for them reading plays a functional role in life. Readers, on the other hand, cannot quite survive unless there is something to read close at hand. When we are asked what we do on vacation, we say, “Go to the beach and read.” When we are eating breakfast and the newspaper has not yet arrived, we readers turn to the cereal box and read the ingredients.

Readers find it hard to throw books way. “Do you really plan to read that again?” my wife will ask, suspiciously eyeing the college textbooks on my shelf: Principles of Physicial Geology and Constitutional Law.